


Retina Burn

by august_the_real, pene



Category: West Wing
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-07-14
Updated: 2002-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-10 13:37:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/august_the_real/pseuds/august_the_real, https://archiveofourown.org/users/pene/pseuds/pene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written with august<br/>"That summer, the beaches washed up dead starfish and he pressed the first letter into her palm. That summer, this thing, this unending catastrophic thing, began."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Retina Burn

She turned when she heard him.

There were sirens, these paralyzing sirens, and gunshots echoed between her temples. But she saw his face across the pavement and it was too much. This time, she thought, it was too much.

**

The first summer he came to visit her, the beaches washed up dead starfish. She met him at the airport and he pressed papers into her palm muttering, "I wrote this on the plane," before disappearing to find his bags. By the time he returned, they were safely in her pocket and she asked about his flight before his eyes slipped away again.

It was strange, and new, and she didn't know him all that well.

The summer was hot, hotter than she ever remembered and he was always more comfortable in long coats and scarves.

They wrote letters to each other often after that summer, and over the years those changed into phone calls and emails. He was a beautiful writer, it was the first thing of beauty she discovered in him, although in time there would be so many he would be a dangerous person to have on her periphery. She felt self-conscious writing to him, misspelling 'you're' and forgetting paragraphs. But she did, because he always wrote back, on napkins and menus and yellow paper.

It started that first summer when she read his letter in her bedroom, slightly drunk and trying to plan a two day tour of LA for someone who had a general contempt for 98% of the population. For most people, it seemed, save her.

He knocked on her door, she looked up from his letter with tired, drunken eyes, he said, "oh, sorry."  
And she said, "Toby. Don't be. Toby."  
"I'm going to bed. I just wanted to say. That."

She had met him earlier, when she had spent a semester in New York. And the first summer he came to visit her, the beaches had washed up dead starfish. It was on the news, in the paper, hundreds of starfish littering the beach like pebbles that had yet to be worn down into sand. Hundreds of starfish, drying to gold and white.

She thought he hadn't heard about them. But later, more than a year later, he visited Ecuador and sent her a rough rug in three shades of red and violet and gold and gray, patterned with spindly stars. It came in brown paper, and the postage was certainly more than he had paid for the rug. She unwrapped it on the floor and laughed under her breath because it was so out of place in her beige and white apartment.

She laughed because he had thought of her in Ecuador and because, when he thought of her, he saw this.

"Toby Ziegler."  
"It's me. I got the rug."  
"Finally. It's Otavaleno."  
"Sure it is, Toby." She said his name to remind him that it was her.  
"Traditional hand woven llama wool." He pronounced llama with a 'y' sound and she didn't know if he was being culturally sensitive or just pretentious.  
"Thank you." There was a murmur in the background and she felt his focus shift.  
"I've got to go."

She had laughed but she hated that he would send her a rug without a note and would never say that he thought of her in a crowded marketplace in another country.

She never mentioned these things. And likely he wouldn't mention the woman's voice in his apartment. As though they could guard themselves. As though they could guard this thing.

But she threw the rug over a creamy sofa and suddenly, months later, she found herself buying cushions in violet and gold, and a print of a dripping palm tree. And when she came home she felt out of place, she felt colorless. But it was hard to be lonely in the midst of all the color.

So later, when John Mark walked out of her front door with some kind of finality she considered calling him. But even before she reached for the phone, it rang and he was there at the end of the line. For a brief moment she wondered at the magic in this, the sense and proportion, but then he was telling her of his engagement and his tone was strangely reverent.

"You'll come to DC?"  
"For the wedding?"  
"I want you to meet her."  
"Sure. I wouldn't miss it, amigo. There are things that poor woman needs to know." She knew she had colored it too lightly, but for now she couldn't trust herself to congratulate him, and of course he didn't mention it, exactly.

"Is something wrong? CJ?"  
"Nope. Nothing, pal. So, give me dates."

**

New York was beautiful, especially from a distance, and in her final semester in undergraduate school she had flown to the east coast with visions of Annie Hall and twenty four hour Chinese restaurants. She had found Tim instead, this wonderful creature who'd played the guitar and introduced her to people who hated the sun.

Before that, she thought she had already met all the people who would change her life.

The first time Tim had introduced him, he'd said, "This is Toby, he just got back from Vietnam."  
"Oh yeah?" She had asked, turning to Toby. "How was it?"  
"Barrel of laughs," he had replied, slicing an apple in quarters.

She'd over-packed for the Springsteen trip, and felt ridiculous as Toby and Tim pulled luggage out of the boot to fit her bag in. It was her third last weekend in New York, and Tim had planned the trip as a final surprise. "And besides," he had said, "Springsteen in California just won't be the same."

So she was sitting on her bags on the side of the road at three in the afternoon, waiting to be picked up. And she smiled as this car rolled towards her, Tim's arm already flailing out of the window, like he was asleep or like it was already too hot to keep everything inside.

She volunteered for the night driving and then drove for three hours before her eyes started blurring the dead road ahead of her. Toby and Tim shared cigarettes in the backseat.

And when the singing and the laughing was over, they settled into the night. The car felt like an airplane, dark and people she didn't know very well sleeping next to her. When her eyelids started getting too heavy, she pulled the car to a stop outside of a closed diner.

She had three weeks left of this, and sometimes she wished she were a smoker so that she would have company when she looked up at the stars.

"You gonna make a break for it?"

She wasn't startled by the voice behind her, but was a little disappointed that it wasn't Tim's. It was the kind of night she loved to share with him: cool air, clear sky and the buzz that reminded her she was twenty-something and alive.

"Yeah, I was going to make a break. Then I remembered I had a buck twenty-five in my pocket and no water to keep me alive." She shrugged, and sat on the verge of the parking lot. "What can you do?"  
"You could survive on a buck twenty-five." Toby sat next to her, feet stretched out in front of him. "At least until the state line."  
"Not in the manner to which I have become accustomed."  
"Oh yeah, what's that?"  
"You know, food. Water. Clothes. That kind of thing."  
"Hey, those state lines are full of plenty of truckers willing to show a girl like you a good time." Toby laughed.  
"A girl like me?"

Toby was silent, and then quietly said, "I feel that I have nothing more to contribute to the conversation that won't result in my getting my head kicked in by a six foot Californian."  
"Wise choice, my friend."

She had no idea where they were, exactly. They had spent more than ten hours on the road, but between food stops and shopping stops and food stops and cigarette stops, she guessed they were no more than four hours away from college.

The parking lot was small, belonged to a diner called "Murphy's", which was too perfect. In Toby's car, Tim was slumped against the window, and Louise was curled up in the backseat. And here she was, sitting on the concrete with Tim's friend Toby. Who was turning out to be a nicer surprise than Springsteen himself.

"I'm tall." She said, suddenly.  
"Excuse me?"  
"I'm tall. You know, for clothes. It's hard to find things, I mean, if I get cold, I have to be prepared. 'Cause, you know, I can't," she was gesturing wildly with her hands, and she looked down at them, horrified at their betrayal. "That's why I packed so much."  
"Ah. So now I know."  
"Now you know," she repeated.

There was a comfortable silence as she stretched her feet out in front of her. He picked up her chocolate bar wrapper and folded it several times against his knee as he watched her slide a cigarette out of his packet. She was transfixed by the noise his lighter made; the unlit cigarette balanced in her hand.

"I've actually met you before." He began.  
"I know. We met-"  
"-No, before last week. It was," he paused, calculating in his mind, "about three weeks ago. At Fergus' party. You walked into the table, spilled some drinks."

She laughed a little, flushed with embarrassment. "Yeah. I do that sometimes."  
He nodded, not laughing, not laughing at her, she noticed. "There are worse things you could do, I suppose."

Her thumb flicked his lighter again, and he reached across to take it and the cigarette out of her hands, simultaneously leaving something in its place.

"You're giving me trash?" She held the Hershey bar wrapper up to the light.  
"It's a crane. Well, it's supposed to be, I can never get the wings…" He shrugged.  
"Toby?"  
"Yeah?"  
"Origami's not your thing, is it?" She balled the paper up and flicked it towards the car. It landed a half meter away.  
He laughed, loud. "You could say it's my gift. And my curse."

"So Tim says you're studying politics. But you used to be, you know, a lawyer."  
"I finished law school three years ago. And then, I went, you know, and then I came back and I'm doing some more study." He looked towards the car.  
"And Tim says you're gonna be a PR lady."  
"Yeah, something like that."  
"What is that, organizing parties and stuff?"  
"Yeah, that's exactly it, Toby." She laughed. "I spent five years in college learning how to organize parties."

He sneaked a glance at her, and she laughed at his sudden seriousness. He was comfortable to laugh with, in the middle of the night.

"You gonna run for President one day?" she asked.  
"Maybe. I'll need an official party director, how about it?"  
"Nah. Who'd get stuck in the public service?"  
"What about for the love of the people?"  
"My mother told me nice girls didn't do that."  
"Do what, CJ?"  
"Love the people."

He laughed again, head tipped back and elbows supporting his weight.

"CJ?"  
"Yeah?"  
"No, I mean, what's it stand for?"  
"Claudia Jean."  
"Claudia Jean," he repeated, and it made her feel restless.  
"It's, it's a family thing. I mean, no one calls me that here."

For the second time that night, he leaned back a little, to stare at her. She was started to get a gauge on him, starting to understand that his eyes darted everywhere except straight at her.

"The first time I met you-"  
"-the time with the table?"  
"No, the time in Tim's kitchen." She reached once more for a cigarette, and twirled it in her fingers. "I said something stupid."  
"Yeah?"  
"I asked about Vietnam. When Tim told me you were, we were doing this, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Sometimes I get, it's a thing with me, sometimes I talk. Before thinking. But I'm getting better, I will be better." She handed him his cigarette back. "So, sorry."  
"You're giving me my cigarette as an apology?"  
"No." She laughed, breathed a laugh. "I'm just saying sorry. That's all."

There was a beat of silence where he reached for his lighter and breathed in smoke.

He said, "it was, unspeakable. Mostly. Unimaginable. And unspeakable."

The smoke was heavy against the sky, rising above their heads. She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested the side of her face on the top of them. She fought back the apology she was biting on, fought back commiserations. She was learning about words, these days, and their power. She listened to the quiet sounds of him smoking.

"There are two fish in a tank." She said, her head still on its side. "And one fish turns to the other fish and says 'I can't drive this thing'."

He snorted smoke through his nose and she giggled a little, as she watched him.  
"Tell me, Toby, why did I only get to meet you when I have three weeks left here?"  
"I was the big New York City finale, didn't you know?"  
"Really? You strike me more as the half time entertainment."  
"You calling me a cheerleader, CJ?"  
"If the pom-pom fits."

And then Tim's voice, from near the car, said, "hey, I can't help but notice we're not moving."  
"Morning there, Tim."  
"Morning there, Toby." Tim sat down next to her, his face still patterned with sleep. "We have ten hours to make it to Springsteen. Ten hours."  
"I was just apprehending your girlfriend here, Tim. She was gonna make a break for it."  
"He's lying, Tim. Toby was trying to pimp me into a life of pleasuring truckers for food and water."

Tim glanced at them both, and then lay back on the pavement. "I knew I should have never introduced the two of you," he mumbled, underneath his arms, "it's going to open up some sort of nexus of the universe and now we're all fucked."

They kind of sat there, on the pavement. Toby passed Tim a cigarette and she was entranced once again by the pattern of smoke against the sky. Finally, Tim lifted his arm up and looked at his wristwatch.

"Nine hours and thirty five minutes to get to Springsteen," he muttered, fatalistically.  
CJ laughed, and stood up. "Come on then, let's get going." She looked around on the pavement for the keys.  
"I'll drive." Toby said, taking them from her hand.  
"Are you sure? 'Cause I'm not so tired."  
"I'm not going back to sleep. You may as well catch a few hours."  
"Okay."  
"Okay." Tim repeated, already walking to the car.

And the car rumbled to a start, and they pulled out of the parking lot. And as she settled against Tim's shoulder to sleep, she glanced once at Toby in the mirror, secretly glad it was his voice she had heard after all.

**

She hadn't considered how much things could change in eight months. There was a new love of Tim's life, and he sounded so happy when he rang CJ that it was hard to be anything but amused. She wanted to ask about Toby, but something made the question hard.

When she was in LA, she hadn't considered that going to the New York graduation party would be anything but the easiest thing in the world. When Tim had called to invite her back, she decided to try and schedule a couple of interviews for PR jobs on the same weekend, help in her justification of spending a large amount of money on one weekend.

"Hey." An indistinguishable voice greeted her, and she kept walking.  
"Hey. Oh, hey." She stopped and smiled at him. "Hey."  
"Hey." He said, laughing at her.  
"You're mocking me? I haven't seen you in," she tipped her drink on her feet as she counted her fingers, "eight months, and you're laughing at me?"  
"Hey CJ?"  
"Yeah?"  
"That's only six fingers."

She smiled at him, and settled against the wall. "Hey."

"Tim mentioned you might be here. I was wondering, I mean, I'm glad."  
"I have some interviews for some firms here. Thought I may as well, you know-"  
"-kill two birds with one stone?"  
"Have a good time, actually."

"You're not going back to study?" He asked. "I mean, you're working now?"  
"Maybe. I don't know. I thought I'd see how these interviews went. I don't, I don't know."  
"You okay, CJ?"  
"Yeah, I'm just a little tired," she glanced back at the house, feeling nauseous at the thought of music and warm beer.  
"You going?"  
"Yeah." She looked out to the road, like she was expecting a cab. "I'm a little tired."

"Come in. Have a drink."  
"No, you know, I think I'm just going to go back to the hotel. I'm pretty tired, and I've got these interviews tomorrow."  
"Well, uh," he glanced inside, and then at her again. She felt strange, scrutinized. "Can I walk you back to the hotel?"

"You just got here." She laughed as she pushed herself off the wall.  
"Yeah, I know. But you know, I'm working now. I have this great job, great job, CJ. And I want to tell, I mean, you're only here for what? Like three days?"  
"Two. I'm going back Sunday morning."

"The thing is, I just, I just started this new job. And there are people in there, I mean, I have to. Please? Please come inside for a drink? There are these people that I have to talk to, for this job, but I've been thinking about you, you know, and I didn't know how to contact, I mean, I didn't want to ask Tim and I saw this billboard when I was driving to Vegas, and I wanted to send you a photo, but I didn't know, and so, you see, you have to come inside for a drink. Please."

It was logic, of a sort, she supposed. And then there was this little back-and-to dance he did with his feet, and the way he pulled his fingers across his temple and down the side of his face.

And he thought of her in Vegas.

She followed him inside.

The smoke was thick. And of course someone had a guitar, and of course someone was passing a joint around. Toby handed her a beer in a cracked plastic cup which bit at her tongue every time she sipped from it.

It was too loud, and not her anymore. She drained her cup and was about to tell him she was going when he grabbed her wrist, and pulled her down the hallway. He closed the bathroom door behind them, and turned to her. "There."  
"There?"  
"I'm so glad you're here tonight, CJ."  
"Glad enough to bring me to a bathroom, it seems." She looked around.

He was searching through his pockets for something, and she felt a little uneasy. But then he flicked his lighter and blew smoke in the opposite direction. He stared at her, unusually, and then sat on the edge of the bathtub.

"So." He breathed in smoke, and knocked his head back. "Go. Let's hear it all."

And she sat next to him, in the tiny bathroom, on the cold bathtub, on a Friday night in New York City. And they talked.

**

And, on the other side of the morning, when they were kicked out of the house or Toby had run out of cigarettes (she could never remember which), they stood facing each other on the pavement, a little shell-shocked. She felt less glamorous in the daylight, with old make up and a sore back from eight hours of bathroom confinement.

And he sneaked a glance at her quickly, and laughed. And she poked his foot with hers and said, "what?"  
"Your interviews." He held his wrist up, and laughed again. "It's 9.23 am. What time were they?"  
"Eight, twelve and three." She shrugged. "Oops."

He laughed then, stopping to look at her and then laughing even louder.

"How much money you got in your pockets?" He asked, suddenly, pulling a handful of crap out of his. She dumped the contents of her jackets in his cupped hands, and counted out crumpled bills and shiny coins.

"We have forty three dollars and thirty two cents," she proclaimed happily.  
He peered into his hands. "So here's what I think? Saturdays are too good to waste on job interviews for jobs you don't want. Let's go buy some vodka, some cigarettes, go see a film, play some pool and get very, very drunk."

And so she spent her New York Saturday with a rookie professional political operative who preferred pineapple juice over orange for his morning vodkas; who very reluctantly sat in a small park and ripped off pieces of bread; who scratched little things in a tiny book as she fell asleep in the afternoon sun.

**

On Sunday morning, in the lobby of her hotel, near the vending machine with the smashed Pepsi button, he said, "so, I never made it to LA. Maybe over summer-"  
"-Yeah. I'd love that."  
"We can hang out. I know some people in San Francisco, we could go visit them."  
"Or we could spend two weeks in theme park hell."  
He laughed at her, and turned to push the button above the broken Pepsi one several times. "So, I'll see you in a couple of months then."

There were uneven beats between them, and she supposed that she wanted to kiss him.

"Call me soon, okay?" She said, smiling at him.  
"Yeah. Yeah, CJ. I will."

**

That summer was the first summer he came to visit her. That summer, the beaches washed up dead starfish and he pressed the first letter into her palm. That summer, this thing, this unending catastrophic thing, began.

**

The first year he came to LA, the second they met up in New Mexico. The third year, she had a job that meant she spent a week every month in Washington. In between, above and against all of this were their letters and phone calls.

In the fourth year, when she decided to go back to school, he came to LA three times. Twice unannounced, and for the weekend only, the third for her birthday, when she unwisely allowed Toby to take her out for dinner rather than her boyfriend of the time.

Three years later, she found herself standing diagonally to her television, holding the aerial at a 65 degree angle so she could get the right cable reception that would tell her the results of a New York City Council race. And then she stood in the phone box at the bottom of her street, barefoot and hopping, wanting to tell him that everybody loses their first race. She hung up when a woman's voice said, "hi, we can't get to the phone at the moment."

Her friends spoke about Toby as an inevitability. She scared herself into moving in with John Mark when she realized that some small, intangible part of her thought the same.

And then, the next year, she was flying to Washington for his wedding.

**

She picked postcards out of her mailbox over the next weeks, and shoved them inside books and folders. She would find them weeks later, unread, and still feel a kind of dullness as he described his honeymoon.

In her fifth week at her new job, he called her.  
"You didn't tell me!" He semi-shouted, accusingly.  
"You had other things on your mind," she said, balancing the phone on her shoulder.  
"Yeah," he chuckled, "I guess I have."  
"How was Stockholm?"  
"Cold. I bought you this thing, this metal thing."  
"Your powers of description amaze me as always, Toby."  
"Hey, tell me about the job. Is it everything?"  
"I don't know," she stared at the papers on her desk. "It's a promotion."  
"Earning more in a year than I get in five, I bet," he said, slyly.  
"Yeah, but you get the love of the people, remember?"  
He laughed into the phone, and she smiled at it. "Yeah, I guess I do."  
"So, I had a meeting with a guy from Triton Day," she began, "there might be a place for me there next year."  
"Why do you sound less than impressed?"  
"It's television. And film. Film and television."  
"So the life and death stuff."

He didn't take it seriously, and the fact that she didn't take it seriously didn't mean that she expected that from him. Which came out as, "yeah."

There were one or two beats of silence, and then he said, "hey, I'm starting a new campaign next month. I'll be in Utah for a while, not too far away."  
"Utah? What the hell is in Utah?"  
"Besides mountains? The Governor's campaign."  
"Andi's moving to Utah?"  
"Andi's running in the next election, so she's staying in the city."  
"You married a politician," she reminded herself.  
"Yeah, as if I could do anything else," he chuckled again, and this time the joke was apart from her.

**

She had watched her parents as they presented a united front to the world. But she saw Andi so rarely that she was sometimes surprised to recall that he was married.

For a couple of years he was in California often, and they were both working all the time, but she saw him for rushed pre-packaged lunches or joined him for fund raisers. They circled the room separately but there was a quiet safety in knowing that she was thought of. And it was something, something separated and not everything, but something. She guarded it, didn't mention it, even to her friends, so maybe it didn't exist and wouldn't dissolve.

He walked her to her car.

"Robbie Bengtsson bothering you?"  
"Nah. It was fine. He has a crush on me."  
He half snorted.  
"It's charisma, Toby, my comrade at arms, charisma and a certain je ne sais quoi."  
"You're lively." It wasn't quite a compliment.  
"I'm charming."  
"Yes."

He looked up at her slightly as they reached her car and there was a pause in the space.

"So, Andi's confident?"  
"Yeah. She's in the front running."  
"That's great."

She bent into her car, lifting the hem of her dress so it didn't drag on the pavement.

"Good night, Toby."  
"Yeah. You want to get lunch Thursday?"  
"Sure. Thursday it is."

**

She'd sometimes wonder whether he told Andi all the things he told her. She'd sometimes wonder whether he told her all the things he told Andi.

And then she'd make herself stop. Because she was many things, but she wasn't that kind of a person.

**

He stopped writing to her, for a while, and she tried to tell herself that he was just busy, but Andi had once told her, half-jokingly and with that four year old sting in her voice, that there had been times when he had worked twenty-eight hours and still stopped to send CJ an email.

He had stopped writing to her for a while, and when she called to tell him she was coming to Washington for a conference she was surprised at the absence in his voice. She was in her office, between meetings, and she wanted to sit, wanted to shake him, wanted an explanation for the absence of words, and absence of self.

He met her at the airport, and she was surprised to see him; never thought she'd see a Toby Ziegler that looked defeated and so far away from the man she shared cigarettes on a dark New York highway. He caught her eye across the terminal and she walked to him, for the first time consciously aware of the fact that they had gotten old. And that she seemed to keep coming back to him.

And, three hours later, they were sitting of the back on his car in the airport parking lot. He told her that he thought things with Andi were over. He told her that he had been thinking about the time they had sat on the edge of a bathtub and talked all night. He leaned in to kiss her. She was on the edge of things, always, the edge of this, too. She kissed him back.

**

She flew back to LA after four days in air conditioned conference rooms with air brushed speakers who stressed the importance of leadership in the broadcast industry. Too many hours in those light rooms but she could only scrape up a memory of how he had stood in the doorway of her room, how he'd held his breath, how he'd pressed on her, how so much of him had pressed her into the wall and the mattress. And how maybe it had only been partly about her.

She wondered what he saw, when he closed his eyes in that hotel room. But, of course, she didn't ask.

**

An inevitability of these situations is that husbands always go back to their wives. And although she told herself this as she bought a three bean salad, she knew the truth of it was the only married man she'd ever slept with had been Toby. And that, at the time, his marriage had seemed a kind of unreality, had seemed a thing apart from his hand on her breast.

He sent her things, the week after. She signed for a ridiculously large FedEx package that contained books and clocks and plastic bracelets filled with orange sherbet. She may have blushed at the package, the ridiculously large package, except there was a kind of sadness in knowing Toby well enough to know that this was his kind of apology.

And now there were more things of him in her apartment. She unpacked the box, and was scared by the green clock that she had admired as they walked to a restaurant on Saturday night.

So. She packed the box up, and slid it into her closet. And spoke quickly when she talked to him on the phone, swallowing breaths, laughing obviously and saying, "of course you should try again Toby, she's your wife."

And the truth of it, she told herself, was that she was more comfortable with him on her periphery. She couldn't imagine a life where she wouldn't have to be careful around him. She couldn't imagine what that would mean.

**

He wrote differently for a time, with a sort of casual almost affection that distanced them. And each time she opened a letter she found again that she could feel relief and anger at once.

She didn't call him because his voice grazed a little, and because when he called he no longer used her name. Which perhaps meant nothing, but of course, she was inclined to read into silences.

Los Angeles was breezy and balmy and felt flat. She was at a Hollywood benefit for children with anemia.

"CJ." An unfamiliar voice.  
She turned. "Andi." And she was frustrated by the unexpectedness of this. Mostly frustrated that she couldn't disguise that she was slightly drunk and about to go home with the cinematographer at her side who was shorter and rounder than Toby.  
"Toby's bothering the bartender." There was a sort of wariness, but it was much the same as it had always been.  
"I'm sure. I didn't expect to be seeing you."  
"Toby didn't tell you?"  
"No."

Toby approached and she found herself discussing NAFTA with his wife as he stared at her ankles. At some point the cinematographer lurched away.

**

It was 1991, her car radio was playing 'Losing My Religion' and her cell phone was smaller than it used to be. She was dating another man named Tim and she didn't think of it as bad luck.

She took the job at Triton Day, which was something. More money. And when she said it, she said it like a justification. She had lived in LA for most of fifteen years now, and had never managed to shake the feeling that she was just passing through.

She started some side projects in LA; working for the Democrats on Emily's List. She met people who knew Toby, who Toby had mentioned, and she found himself playing down their friendship, saying, "I haven't talk to him in years."

**

Eventually Andi left him. He didn't write. He didn't return the calls to his cell phone. And CJ heard it through a friend of a friend of too many friends. But one night he turned up on her doorstep.

He stood in her living room, dripping, and looked out of place, looked like he'd been cut out of a magazine and positioned awkwardly in space.

She brought him clothes that Tim had left some morning.

"You need to dry off."  
He grunted and she wanted to kick him.

"Tell me what happened."  
"She left, CJ. I don't want to talk about it."  
"Right." A pause. "And you're here because?"  
"LA has always been my favorite place for a getaway."  
She pressed her lips together and his eyes skittered across her face momentarily.

"Let's get a drink."  
He nodded.

It was still raining. Big drops of un-Californian rain that stained her hair and skin. But Kingsman's Lucky Lounge was less than a block away.

"We lost the election. Fallon lost." As though she didn't know.  
"Yeah."  
"But she was gone before that. She... I really wasn't there. I was barely home. It was... I think I lost the sense of there being an us somewhere. I forgot what it meant."  
"The marriage?"  
"Andi and I."  
"Right."  
"Andi and I." He said it with too much emphasis and she wondered if he was testing her.

"Another one?"  
"Of course."

"You're not... it wasn't... She never knew about us."  
And she was suddenly angry that he'd dragged that time, their time in the dark into this, as though they played into one another. Though of course, they did and she hated it, hated to be a part of something so ordinary and frightening.  
"Might have been better. To have told her."  
"Yeah. Yeah." His body sank into the booth.  
"I don't know, Toby. What would I know?" She was helpless in the face of this and she was almost as drunk as he was. He let his breath spill slowly and then reached across the table for her hand. She wouldn't let herself eye their overlapping fingers. She didn't want to know what this meant.

**

"What are you going to do next?" She asked it a day later, when the question wouldn't seem to be about her. He sat amongst the starfish and the green and gold and red.  
"There's some guys working with Leo McGarry and Bartlett from New Hampshire."  
"Do I know... He's the Governor?"  
"Yeah. For now." And he made it sound like she should know more about this. She felt out of some loop that she didn't know existed.  
"Righty-o compadre."

**

"I imagined it different from this," he said, somewhere in conversation on the way to the airport. She flicked her indicator on and concentrated on changing lanes, not wanting to tell him that she had too. But then at the lights, when she turned to him, he brushed a hand across the leg of his pants and looked out the window.

Six months later, she had lost her job and he was on her doorstep again. And this time it wasn't about indebtedness or getaways.

**

So then there were other people, these wildly intelligent, slightly crazed other people woven in to their knowing one another.

Sam had been singing Sinatra since they arrived in Chicago for the Primaries. Josh bought him a guide book of the city on the second day in the hopes that it would shut him up. Josh had subsequently learnt that Sam could multi-task when he stopped half way through "…the union stockhouse…" to quote some obscure fact concerning the foundations of some old, pointless building.

It became a kind of tradition after that, or at least that's how it started. Every city they stopped in, someone bought Sam a guide book. After a while people stopped owning up to it and they just appeared on his bed, on his table and one time in his shower, suspended with fishing wire.

Sam tried to explain it, to justify it over dinner one night in Texas.

"I don't collect them."  
"No?" Mandy said automatically, not even sure what the conversation is about.  
"No!"  
"You just have one from every city we've been to since Chicago?" Josh baited, from the other end of the table.  
"They were presents! I keep them. Presents."  
"You don't tour anywhere, Sam. You don't have time to tour anywhere."  
"It's information, Josh. It's education."  
"You are such a geek." Josh threw a coaster at Sam.  
"It's education, CJ," Sam pleaded, turning to her.  
"Don't involve me, children." She said, absently, watching the muted CNN above the bar.

"Oh Toby?" Josh's attention shifted.  
"Yeah."  
"You were wrong."  
"Yeah."  
"About the Knicks, Toby."  
"Yes, Josh."  
"I'm just saying, you were wrong. Which, you know, makes you the loser."  
"Yeah."  
"I'm a big man, Toby, as big as the next person. I'm not going to make you keep your word-"  
"-Josh…"  
"-All I'm saying, Toby, is that a politician's word-"  
"-Josh, shut up. I'll do it. Just shut up. For humanity."  
"Woohoo!" Josh turned to the rest of the table. "Folks, we're going to karaoke."

Which is how they ended up in a karaoke bar in Austin, Texas. By the time Sam and Toby had spilt a bottle of scotch between them, CJ had drunk what felt like her weight in butterscotch schnapps.

And she was glad no one was looking at her when Josh finally pushed him on stage. Was glad that the sight of Toby stumbling his way through Jersey Girl was something to watch intently. It was a kind of flattening pain.

"A lot of people think 'Jersey Girl' was written by Springsteen, CJ," he had said to her as they walked away from a Springsteen concert almost twenty years ago. "It's not. It was written by Tom Waits. Tom fucking Waits, CJ, the man is a genius. This is a love song, you know, the man is a genius."

And so here was a Toby who got up on stage, who looked at her and said, "this one's for you". Who let Josh and Sam and Mandy laugh at that like they could possibly know what it meant. Who sung her almost-Springsteen songs, like there had never been the four days in her hotel in Washington followed by eighteen months of silence and a shattered marriage.

She is lucky there are these other ones, who collect guide books and bet personal dignity on basketball games. Without them, it would be only her and Toby and too much history.

**

It was already almost too much.

She only touched him in crowded rooms. In his office, in her office, she kept a desk and cubic feet of space between them, as though she could guard herself in this. As though she could put a stop to it.

And somehow that made it seem as though something had already been stated. As though there was a finiteness to this. But it also made it impossible to grasp.

She has become wary of him. One night, they were having chili mussels in a bay-side restaurant. She forgets which city, even which country, but she remembers Josh had asked her how she and Toby had met. And with all eyes upon her, including Toby's, she found inexplicable sentences coming out of her mouth. She found herself saying, "you know, I don't really remember anymore."

**

They attended the formal reception for Lord Marbury and he stayed by her side, bringing her drinks and watching her shoulders. There is chemistry, and history, and now this seeing him every day.

She wants to forget that he stood in her office and questioned everything about her professional ability, questioned everything he knew about she was capable of.

"You like him, don't you?" Toby was standing a little behind her, and she had to turn to talk to him.  
"Who?"  
"The English guy."  
She snorted. "What are we, fifteen?"

He stared into the bottom of his glass, "I wish I had met you when I was fifteen."  
"No, you don't. I've already told you, I was like seven feet tall even then. You would have been a midget."  
He moved closer to her, and it was one of those times when she could rest a hand on him, because they were in front of everyone, and the media. "You were never seven feet tall, CJ."  
"Ya-ha. Was too. I've shrunk."  
"You don't shrink until you're eighty."  
"Yeah, that's my secret." She waved her glass at him for emphasis, "imagine, all these years you've really been in love with an eighty year old."

Her hand was still on his arm, and her fingers had tightened on his skin, a little. He was staring her down, and she realized that if he didn't know how his anger stained, she had never quite gotten the hang of her jokes.

Her hand was on him, like a reminder, like a Geiger counter.

Sometimes, she saw the things that might have made Andi leave.

She kissed Danny because there was a part of her that wanted an uncomplicated lover. And although Danny is anything but uncomplicated, he is worlds away from the Toby who lied to her like she was his kid niece. Who pushes harder, each time.

In the ballroom, he said, not moving out of her touch and watching Bartlet cross the room with minimal attention, "if we had met when you were fifteen, we could have been childhood sweethearts."  
She laughed out loud as this, and people turned at the sound. "I can't imagine you being anyone's childhood sweetheart, Toby."  
"I've told you about Elanna."  
"Toby, she didn't speak English!"  
"You can't fight love, CJ."  
"That right, Romeo? You gonna start singing me love songs now?"

And he leaned in, near her ear, like he was going to start singing, like was going to tell her everything. And they stood, like that, with his breath on her cheek and on her ear. They stand for longer than they should, for longer than she's ever let herself before.

He followed her into an outside room, which was not that much different from the ballroom. She turned to him. There was some finality, inevitably, some vacuum moment of half beats and desire. She pulled him toward her.

**

She was sure of this, then, slowly sure, and maybe sure of him, but tired too. So when he called she let her voice mail pick it up. It wasn't fear, because she'd known this for years, and it wasn't about being somebody's second choice, because she knew, she knew. But she had been lulled by decades of baby steps, years with other people and those times, those ugly swollen times, when coming together was more about an ending than a beginning. This was a different creature, perhaps. And this time she had to make a decision.

**

She tried to catch his attention twice that day. The first time, he was in a meeting with Sam and Leo. The second time he was banging his head slightly against the desk, holding the telephone receiver away from his head. She turned to Ginger, "what's up with Toby?"  
Ginger peered around the door frame and shrugged. "You gotta stay for when he starts talking about the destruction wreaked by automated services."

She flashed a glance at Ginger, wondered what school of subversive corporate terrorism all their assistants came from, and then quickly left.

The third time his office was empty, and he was pouring over papers. She slumped into his couch and waited patiently for him to finish writing. And then, tired of waiting, she said, "so, you wanna hear about this new guy I'm seeing?"  
He looked up from his papers. "Cute."  
"Yeah, I thought so."  
"So I'd be talking about me? Cute."  
"I am cute, you know. It's not a well known fact about me."  
"Hard to believe, CJ."  
"That I'm cute?" She bristled.  
"Yeah. Cos I thought what I'd first do was insult you…" His voice and he half chuckled at her.  
"Oh Toby, that's a shame."  
"What?"  
"I was gonna be nice. Make you laugh."  
"And now?"  
"No."  
"No," he repeated.

She stretched out across his sofa.

"So, I thought, it's a light day. We could, you know, go and do something like real people."  
"We're not real people?"  
She threw an arm across her eyes, pushing back into his couch. "You know what I mean."  
"Like going to the doctors? Buy a flea collar for your cat, or something?"  
"Cute." She smiled underneath her arm.  
"Yeah. You see what I'm doing now? I'm being very funny."  
"Cute, Toby."

She sat up, and turned to him. "I thought we could go catch a movie. A late one, you know."  
He groaned.  
"What, Toby?"  
"You always make me see films about lesbians in New York City."  
"You have a mind like a fucking elephant, Toby. That was, like, seven years ago."  
"Psychological damage. I told you that, at the time."  
"Yeah, I remember. Very loudly. In the middle of the film."  
He grinned, "so, I'll be choosing then."  
She shrugged, "that just means I get to choose other stuff later."  
"What kind of stuff?"

She smiled, the type of smile she had lately been using only with him, and never in this building. "The fun stuff." And she stood up and walked away.

Almost an hour later, he pushed open her office door. When he shut it behind him and turned to her, all she could say was, "let's go."

And they didn't see a movie, but stopped off at a little Vietnamese restaurant two streets from his place. They sat, surrounded by people who didn't know, or likely didn't care, that two senior aides to the President ordered food they didn't eat. He tucked stray hairs behind her ear. She ran her fingers down the crease in his trousers.

**

In Virginia, there were gunshots.

There had been mornings when she'd reached for him before she'd reached for the light. And still amongst a thousand strangers she has an unnatural sense of where he stands. But here in the waiting room her ears ring. She can't swallow the water some nurse pressed on her. And when he approaches she flinches.

She understood, she understands, the sickness in this, in the pale streak of Josh's blood on his shirt sleeve, in the flicker of the lights. And this face, now steeped in fear, has soaked into the one that moved above her, that breathed around her lips, into the one that called for a doctor across the pavement.

She turned when she heard him then, turned with swimming blood and pounding ears, immobilized with the thought that something had happened to him, and when this was all over, she knew she wouldn't be able to forget that.

She doesn't go to him, doesn't look at him across the waiting room. The scratch on her neck is stinging, is a small, thin sting and she feels anchored to it. She doesn't go to him, doesn't look at him across the waiting room because there is a small scratch that is keeping her together and the man who has been on her periphery for longer than she can remembers looks like he wants to touch her with the exact kindness that could cleave that apart.

***

Her mother was a doctor. Before the shooting, the sound of sirens always reminded her of her mother bristling, preparing for an imaginary emergency room that she was not due in. She is puzzled by these vestigial, double memories. Like phantom limbs, or fading retina burns.

She is older now, of course, and the only things that sirens will remind her of again is Rosslyn and being face down on a pavement, too scared to move. It will be tied to the noise forever, even when they're living in France and teaching media courses.

And today the sirens sound for a stranger who has set fire to himself on the green of the White House lawn. The noise almost drowns his choked screams.

She doesn't know if it's a protest or a sign of some kind of empathy with them. A sign that someone understands how the pavement will always run across her eyes, how she will never return to Rosslyn, how the necklace she was wearing will always be buried at the bottom of a drawer. It's not really the same, of course, as setting yourself on fire. But this day is too close to that last one and all she can do is close the blinds in her office.

**

After the second night passes and they are all still wearing the same clothes, Margaret threatens to turn a hose on them if they don't get some sleep. Toby watches her intently at their final briefing, when Margaret orders them home. They have talked, maybe two or three times, but mostly he can't stop staring at her neck.

And she knows he is waiting in her office but she calls a cab from Josh's office and leaves without her briefcase.

And there is another kind of unreality, another pantomime, as she finds herself in a bar, staring at an untouched glass of wine.

And although she knows that Toby is waiting for her, she keeps thinking about his eyes and his hands, and she goes home with the first man in the first bar who doesn't remind her of him.

**

It's like little knives, lying there not sleeping in a stranger's bed. And in the even darkness she can see his face, and his finger marks are implanted in her hair. She breathes slowly and he says, "you okay?", as though this thing around her begins and end with him.  
"Yeah."  
She shifts slightly so they are not touching but she feels him in the sheets that lie awkwardly across her body. And she breathes and he is there.

"I'm gonna go."  
"Yeah. OK."  
"OK."

She gets up and dresses hurriedly in the light from the street. He half sits, awkwardly, in bed as she leaves.

"I'll see you," she says, as an after thought.  
"Yeah."

**

He is sitting on her front doorstep when she steps out of the taxi. "Toby?" She is aware of the fact that it is a few hours into the morning and he has changed clothes and she hasn't.  
"I didn't know, I mean, I didn't want to go home. How are you?"

And he steps toward her, and it is all about concern, and it is a slightly stinging thing.

"I'm, good, Toby, how are you?" And she has to stop herself from running, or crying, or breathing because he'll know. Likely he already does. And she can't pretend that it doesn't matter, she can't untangle his tone, and she watches as he chooses his words carefully.

"Can we go inside, CJ?"  
"Toby, you should sleep, it's-"  
"-Can we just go inside? Please?" He sits back down on the steps, and after a moment she joins him. And she wishes she had showered because it mostly makes her want to cry, sitting next to Toby with a stranger's hands still on her skin.

"I'm sorry." He whispers as he slides his hand along hers, like a child, she thinks.

She expected anger, would have bathed in his anger, and instead there was this.

They sit in silence, on the steps. His fingers rub her palm, softly and then harder, and she thinks maybe they will sit here forever. They'd have to resign their positions, of course, but maybe this time it was too much.

Except he's saying, "it could have been you, CJ, and I just don't know…"

And so this is the way it sometimes was. She goes backwards and through herself to avoid certain truths, and then he comes along and forces her eyelids open until it burns. He moves in like he wants to kiss her, and instead she stands and takes his hand, he follows her inside.

Later that night when she's on her knees in her bathroom throwing up, he stands a little behind her and awkwardly rubs her back. And there are more apologies, although they don't talk about what for. They can only ever afford to acknowledge the edge of things.

CJ knows all about keeping her head down and holding it together until she can shut the door. They pretend they don't hear sirens and close the blinds on the body of a burning man. And Toby stays that night in her house, and the rest of the week as well. She knows that she loves him, that she is mostly in love with him, too. But there are years, hotel rooms, a marriage and now a shooting that fracture and seep from that. And she keeps her head down, she makes it behind the door, and sometimes, only sometimes when he's above her, does she let herself say in that too sad murmur, "oh god, Toby, oh god."

**

They are in her kitchen, making pasta from a jar. He has her bent across the table, and she grips the edge as his hand is on her hip and the back of her neck, keeping her down. She's too tall for this, she knows, and maybe he's too old. And maybe there's a hundred other things, including an old beach full of dead starfish and the sound of sirens that remind her of a burning man and Rosslyn.

And there are better times than this, there will be better times than this; the surface is cool against her cheek. He is reaching up to something, moving faster now but when he bangs his knee against the wood and swears, she turns in his grip. She stands taller than him, and they're half-dressed and he has a look on his face which is abject…something. Which is abject.

And then he reaches for her, like he doesn't expect her to be there, and she wants to tell him that it's okay to close his eyes, that it's okay to remember things that aren't about her. There will be better times than this, she knows, because sometimes when she closes her eyes, it's his image that burns the back of her eyes.


End file.
